EDP

The Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors approved an update to the Eclipse Foundation’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy in October 2019. With help from some of our open source project teams and the Eclipse Architecture Council, we’ve been defining, refining, and rolling out updates to our corresponding IP due diligence process and supporting services. A big part of this update is a change in the way that we will manage third party content.

Committers are the developers who hold the keys for an open source project. They are the ones who get to push code directly to source code repositories, configure build servers, push the output of builds to the download server, and so on. They are the ones who make decisions that set the path of their open source project.

We identified a hole in our committer agreement process that excluded individuals with a certain employment status from participating in Eclipse Foundation open source specification projects operating under the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP).

The Eclipse Foundation has several agreements that we use to ensure that contributors understand the terms by which they make their contributions and, especially, to give them an opportunity to assert that they have the necessary rights to make those contributions under the terms of the corresponding project license.

Under the original Eclipse Foundation Intellectual Property (IP) Policy, every bit of third party content needed to be thoroughly reviewed before it could be used by an Eclipse project. And the reviews were thorough: license scan, provenance check, scan for anomalies, … Reviews of third party content literally took days, weeks, and months. All of that review needed to be complete before the project team could commit any code that made any reference to that third party content.

Sharon Corbett drafted this message that the IP Team has been posting on some of our CQs. I’d like to share it more broadly.

The Eclipse Board of Directors approved changes to the Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy on October 21, 2019. The most significant change relates to how we will perform due diligence of leveraged Third Party Content (Section IV B).